


for just one moment (come back to me)

by incendir



Category: Winner (Band)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-11 15:50:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8997169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/incendir/pseuds/incendir
Summary: you never meant to keep it a secret forever





	

You don’t know why you do it, but the first time you see him - from a distance, the khaki slacks that on every other student are ill-fitted and standard clinging to his long legs as if they were tailored - you take off your watch. You put it into your pocket along with slinging your backpack with the outside towards your arm. You’re glad, suddenly, that you’re alone right now while you walk up to him - you’re glad none of your friends are with you. 

You take off your family’s ring, and tuck the chain around your neck deeper beneath the collar of your shirt as well.

“Hi,” you say, when you’re standing in front of him, when he turns from putting books away into his locker after hearing the approaching footsteps. 

He’s taller than you - of course he is, with those long legs that can make uniform pants look branded. His hair looks soft, falling slightly over his eyes and swept neatly to the side. There’s an amused light in his eyes as he takes you in. “Please tell me I didn’t meet you yesterday and already forgot your name,” he says, but the confidence in his voice makes it clear that he isn’t the kind of person who would ever do that - he’s good with names and faces, and everything about his expression tells you that. 

“I’m not a first year,” you say, “or a transfer. I wasn’t here yesterday.”

He smiles warmly, eyes dancing as he extends a hand. “I wouldn’t have been able to forget a face like that, anyway,” he says as you shake his hand. “I’m Seunghoon.”

“You’re a transfer?” you ask. “Scholarship transfer?”

He nods, taking his hand from yours. Your eyes scan the inside of his locker behind him. You catch a photograph pinned to the inside of the door - a family picture on the beach. “I came in from Busan for the orientation a few days ago,” he says, and then a slow grin spreads on his face. “So I really don’t know what the hell I’m doing.”

You smile back, shifting your backpack against your shoulder - the movement jostles the watch in your pocket. “I’m Jinwoo,” you say. “I can show you around if you’re free today after class.”

After Seunghoon tells you, almost dryly, that since he literally doesn’t know a single soul in this city that his schedule is very much empty aside from the few assignments they’ve had that he’s trying to ignore anyway currently, you text your driver and tell him that he doesn’t need to pick you up today - you’ll make it home on your own.

 

* * *

 

Seunghoon doesn’t find out until the month before you graduate. 

You never meant to keep it secret forever - you knew that it would come out at some point. You just wanted enough time for him to know you before you told him. You thought that maybe a half of the school year would have been enough. You thought, after you first held his hand a month after you met him - the afternoon you walked with him all the way to his boardinghouse, getting ice cream on the way and laughing at his jokes until you almost vomited back the double-strawberry scoops you’d inhaled - you thought, then, that you would tell him.

You thought - the night you kissed him for the first time, on the roof of the school, far too late for either of you to still be there, and you only managed to get up there with him in the first place because you had gotten the keys from someone on student council because your father knows his father, but you lie to Seunghoon about it, you tell him you just stole them from the custodian’s closet - you thought, then, against the warmth of his lips, that maybe you’d tell him.

You thought, the day you sleep over in his small boarding room, sharing a bed that can hardly fit one growing adolescent boy, your body pressed up to his, hands wandering and khaki slacks being unzipped - shirts being shucked up and vests being thrown onto the floor - you thought, now, right now, right after this, as he lazily kisses you, long legs framing your hips, that you need to tell him. Whether or not he thinks differently of you, he deserves to know. 

But you don’t tell him. 

After all that time, all those chances, you still haven’t told him, and one day, a month before you graduate, you reach the empty classroom that he’d told you to meet him at after classes - nothing out of the ordinary - and you walk through the door to see him sitting on a desk and holding your ring. 

There’s no betrayal or disappointment or revulsion on his face - there’s just coldness. 

“I don’t care,” he says, standing up and crossing over to where you stand, “who your family is. I don’t care about how much money you have.” He stuffs the ring in your hand, eyes looking into yours with so much hurt and anger that you realize, right then, he will never forgive you. “I care that you thought I would care.”

He brushes past you, shoulder slamming into yours hard enough to make you stumble. 

You don’t know how long you stand there holding the ring.

All you know is that when you finally do leave, the sun has already set and your driver barely is holding in the irritation on his expression. As he drives off onto the main road, you open the window and throw the ring out.

(You tell your parents, later when they ask where it is because at events they expect you to wear it, that you’ve lost it.)

 

* * *

 

He doesn’t pick up your calls. 

He’s always been smarter than you - a faster thinker, far cleverer - so it’s child’s play for him to avoid you in the last few weeks you have with him at school. You realize, then, that in the time you had with him, you never knew his friend circle, and even if you did, they are so far removed from yours that it’s impossible to plead with them to get him to talk to you.

As far as you know, as far as you can tell, they hate you too.

You know that he’ll return to Busan once classes end. You know, now, he won’t stay for graduation because there isn’t anyone graduating that he cares to see. 

Your fatal flaw is that you don’t know how to stop hoping until you’re completely shot down, rejected, stomped on without any hope of a change in heart. So - before the last day of classes, you write a letter on a page torn out of your calculus notebook and slip it into his locker in the morning. 

In that letter, you tell him everything.

You tell him about the third year boy you’d met in your first year - the boy that kissed you and smiled at you and laughed with you, and had asked you to take him to that restaurant that your sister loves. You tell him about the boy who had told you how much he liked your watch, and asked if, for his birthday, you would give him one just like it. You tell him about all the times that boy told you he forgot his bus pass and asked you to have your driver drop him home. You tell him about the time you told that boy that all of this money isn’t yours - it’s your parents’ - and you don’t want to spend it on him anymore. 

You write, in that letter, about how that boy had told you, a week before he graduated, with a smile on his face, that you should get used to spending your parents’ money on other people because, other than your face, it would be the only way to keep people at your side. 

In that letter, you tell him that you’re sorry - that you shouldn’t have assumed he would’ve cared or that he would’ve used you in the same way that you wanted him to know you before judging you. You’d judged him before you knew him as well, and you tell him you’re sorry - you’re so, so sorry. 

You ask him to meet you after his last class on the last day of the semester - on the rooftop - so you can explain more if he needs that, so you can beg for him to at least still be your friend even if everything that you two once were is now off the table. 

You signed your name at the end of it all, and you write, after that, that you think you might love him. 

 

* * *

 

Seunghoon never comes to the rooftop. 

You wait for two hours after classes end - you tell your driver to go home without you after the first thirty minutes. When the sun begins to set, you take the stairs back down rather than the elevator, and you walk home. 

You don’t blame him. 

After all, you were the liar. 

 

* * *

 

When you come back down from the stage with your diploma, your mother and sisters are crying, and your father claps your back, squeezing your shoulder and proudly shakes the hands of all your teachers. You don’t have much time in the teary embraces of your mother and sisters before your classmates come pouring in around you, their own arms filled with bouquets of flowers and their diplomas - they drag you off, the comradery only those in the same year could have that a part of your journey has been finished, and the next one about to begin. 

There’s chatter of where you’ll all go for dinner celebrations, and all of the teachers and parents are also clamoring around trying to organize the events for tonight and possibly tomorrow. You let yourself be happy in that moment as a few of the underclassmen you’re close to also come towards you to congratulate and embrace you. 

Your eyes still sweep around through the people in the auditorium - searching and searching even though you’ve told yourself again and again that it’s impossible, that he’s already returned to his home, that he’d probably left the city a week ago. 

You’re right. 

You don’t see him, and you push down the sick emptiness and regret in your stomach, painting on a smile when you hear your mother asking you if you were going to go with your classmates’ first or if you’d come back home first to where your grandparents and cousins and aunts and uncles probably already were - most likely having arrived throughout the long ceremony. 

You tell her that either way is fine, and you let yourself be happy - in that moment, and you try not to think about how wide his smile would have been for you right now, about what his long arms would have felt like squeezing around you, his voice congratulating you right near your ear. 

 

* * *

 

The summer passes, and you can’t forget about him - not even for a day - but you heal. 

 

* * *

 

You get a text message in the last week of August, when the air is thick and heavy with the last and worst of the summer heat - humidity so dense that you feel perspiration forming the moment you step outside. You’re getting ready to move into an apartment close to your university, your sisters helping you, and you’re sitting on a box you’ve finally finished packing, catching your breath with a bottle of water balanced in your lap, when you get a text message from a name you haven’t seen in three months.

You open it and see a photo of a beach. 

Another message follows it - actual words, this time. 

_ If you’re not embarrassed to be hanging out with a high school kid, I know where you can get the best ice cream in Busan.  _

You’re glad your sisters have gone out to get more packing tape and to pick up lunch for the three of you. You’re glad they aren’t here because your eyes suddenly sting, even though you’re smiling as you type back. 

_ Only if you’re buying.  _


End file.
